culture

FOX: Boston Med Student Arrested in ‘Craigslist Killer’ Case AJE: Tamil Tigers Have 24 Hours to Live; May Eat Fried Chicken, Drink a Nantucket Reuters: Obama Shakes Hands with Chavez; America Finds Strength to Carry On LAT: Obama Asks CIA to Chart New Course, Maybe Relax with the Water WP: Race Books Lead Arts Pulitzers; Being Black…

Pat Riley was always fond of saying that a playoff series doesn’t begin in earnest until the road team wins a game; his rationale is that home court is a huge advantage in the NBA. Riley probably liked the action this weekend in the NBA playoffs; four road teams won. The first round of the…

The winners of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes announced Monday: JOURNALISM: Public Service: The Las Vegas Sun. Breaking News Reporting: The New York Times staff. Investigative Reporting: David Barstow of The New York Times. Explanatory Reporting: Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times. Local Reporting: Jim Schaefer, M.L. Elrick and staff of the…

New Orleans is my city Katrina had to move me… I’m the Ninth Ward, for sure -Kim “Black Kold Madina” Rivers Roberts, “Ninth Ward”  To watch Kim Rivers Roberts rap toward the end of the Oscar-nominated Trouble the Water, which debuts on HBO on Thursday, is to see the whole nightmare of Katrina crystallized in…

USAT: +10: Columbine Survivors Remember Madness a Decade Later NYT: Prisoner Waterboarded 183 Times; CIA: “If at First You Don’t Succeed…” HP: Some Give Prez a FAIL Over CIA Treatment; In Other News, GOP Suddenly Loves Obama CNN: CBC Mad at Prez Over Conference, Not Asking Their Permission for Stuff in General AJE: Pirates Seize Belgian Ship,…

MONDAY AP: Sri Lankan Civilians Stay in War Zone Despite Lull ABC: Face Transplant Patient Doing Well; No Longer Responds to “Michael Steele” BBC: Obama to Lift Cuba Restrictions; Lovers of Freedom Hate This, Not Sure Why JJ: An Anti-Gay Marriage Commercial Parody CK: Watch the White House Easter Egg Roll; No, It’s Not a…

Movies based on real-life events or people tend to sink or soar based on the level of dramatic imagination injected into the true story; that is the creative element that burnishes details and streamlines the narrative to reveal the complexities that make a story worth telling. Think A Beautiful Mind or The Hurricane or even…

David Halberstam wrote many great—and long—books, most notably Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made, but my favorite of these is The Breaks of the Game. He spends the 1979-80 season with the Portland Trail Blazers. The glow of their legendary 1977 title team had just faded, and what was left was…

Conservatives have this much right: It’s remarkable how much havoc poorly made public policy can wreak. Way back in 1986, when a Democratic Congress hastily and overwhelmingly passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act—the first step in stacking judicial power in the hands of prosecutors rather than judges and juries—members likely never imagined it would set in…